Like most of you I have been intently focused on the wildfires that have swept through the California North Coast wine region and their tragic human impact. It is difficult to accept that such loss of life and property is possible, but the fires and the winds that drive them have been relentless.

I started getting calls from reporters as soon as a wildfire emergency was declared and, like many others, I declined to comment on the economic impacts. Too soon to know, I said, and not the real story in any case. More important to tell the human story and help people come together and cope with loss.

Still Too Soon

It is still too soon to know the economic impacts. The fire danger continues and the fatality and property damage reports are still coming in. But I have started to think about the nature of the potential losses to the wine industry. As Tom Wark wrote last week, we need to think about what happens when the fires are finally out, even if that’s not the most important immediate concern.

Here is what I am thinking now. The direct impact of the wildfires on California wine will very unevenly distributed, because that’s how a wildfire works, but the indirect effects are likely to be even larger and widespread. It is important to get out the message that California wine is open for business.

Uneven Direct Impact

The North Coast region (Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino, and Lake counties) is very important in terms of the value of the wine it produces, but is dwarfed by Central Valley production in terms of volume. The huge quantities of California appellation wines that fill the nation’s retail shelves will not be much affected by the wildfires. This is important to realize since some press reports link the wildfires to the tight global wine market that has resulted from poor harvests in Europe this year, which risks giving a false impression about wine supplies in California.

While some North Coast vineyards and wineries lost everything, others suffered little or no direct damage to cellar, vineyard, or wine stocks. The floor of the Napa Valley, for example, is not much damaged so far. But that doesn’t mean that wineries without direct damage won’t suffer an economic loss.

Wine Tourism Losses

No way to put a dollar and cents figure on the direct losses until individual assessments of winery destruction, vineyard damage, loss to stored wines, possible smoke taint issues, and so forth are made. But we can already see the indirect cost in one area: tourism.

Wine tourism is incredibly important to Napa and Sonoma these days, both for the high-margin direct sales that wineries there increasingly rely upon to compensate for escalating grape costs and for the hospitality industry that has grown up to serve wine tourists. The economic impact of wine tourism is very large for the region.

On a typical day in 2016, according to the latest Napa tourism economic impact study, there were almost 17,000 tourist in the Napa Valley who spend more than $5 million. These are not typical days and the income and jobs those numbers represent are nowhere to be seen for now.

The wildfires have obviously interrupted wine tourism even for wineries that are not directly affected by the fires and it is not clear how soon anything like a normal tourist flow will return. This is complicated by a number of factors including the perception that the whole region is badly burnt and therefore closed for business, damage to transportation and hospitality infrastructure, and problems for the workers who support both the wine and hospitality industries.

It’s a People Business

Many of the workers who live in the region are dealing with personal losses or are busy helping those in need. The hundreds of workers who live outside the local area and commute to jobs in Napa face obviously obvious obstacles, too. In the short term I am told that it is actually the shortage of staff more than the direct impacts of the fires that limits winery operations in many cases.

The bottom line is that while the direct damage from the firestorm is large but unevenly distributed, the indirect costs are likely to be even bigger and affect almost everyone in the region, wine people and non-wine folks, too. It is not entirely clear what normal will look like when the smoke clears and it will take some time to find out. But, as Tom Wark writes, Napa Stands Strong (and Sonoma, too) and it is important to press ahead.

Renewal and Rebirth

The videos I have seen of the fire damage bring to mind scenes of burning Napa vineyards that appear in a wonderful 1942 book by Alice Tisdale Hobart called The Cup and the Sword(which was made into a terrible 1959 film called This Earth is Mine starring Rock Hudson and Jean Simmons and set in Napa and Sonoma).

Hobart’s novel is about the resilience of the strong women and men who built the California wine industry and the vineyard fire signifies rebirth from the ashes because, with some effort and care, the sturdy vines in the novel do come back to life. It is an image to keep in mind today when recovery, rebuilding, and rebirth are on our minds once again.

Sue and I are back from Mendoza and gearing up for the release of my next book in a couple of weeks. Around the World in Eighty Wines draws its inspiration from the people we have met and the wines we’ve tasted as we have circled the globe in recent years. Can’t wait for my copy to arrive!

Publisher’s Weekly provides pre-publication reviews to alert bookstores and libraries about interesting and important new books they might want to purchase. I was pleased with the Publisher’s Weekly review of Eighty Wines, which seemed to capture the spirit of the book. Here is an excerpt of the review:

Veseth chooses the wines he profiles based on the ability of each to excite the palate, and the imagination: “Each of [the] eighty wines must tell a story, [but they] must not just each tell their own story…. They must collectively form a picture and tell a story that reveals a greater truth,” he writes. As a result, reading his book is rather like attending a swanky cocktail party: it contains a vast and varied buffet, with loads of interesting conversational tidbits.

PW’s Daniel Lefferts was intrigued by the book review and asked for a Publisher’s Weekly interview about the book’s back-story. Here is my favorite Q&A from the interview:

What surprised you most while working on this book?If you take this journey with me, you go to places where you expect to find wine, like France and Italy and California, and you go to places that you would never think could make wine, or where anybody would make wine. [You] see how wine inspires people to overcome such natural and political and human odds. … The power of wine … to transform how people think about food, how they think about themselves and the places that they live: it’s inspiring.

Booklist has also published a brief review, which captures the spirit of adventure that drives Eighty Wines and comes close to revealing the surprise ending. Surprise ending? Well, Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days has a plot twist in the final chapter and, inspired by Verne, my book does so, too. I think readers will smile when the twist is revealed — it makes me smile just thinking about it!

I hope my readers will be as inspired by Around the World in Eighty Wines and we were by the people, places and wines we encountered doing the research. November 1 is the official release date!

Good conferences succeed because they work on several levels at once. Keynote speakers, for example, are most useful if they stimulate discussion among conference participants to allow them to shape and share their own thinking.

My keynote is about “Wine Tourism for Sustainable Development: Opportunities, Strategies, Pitfalls” and my goal is not to tell people what to think and do but instead challenge them ask new questions and rethink the answers to old ones.

The UNWTO welcomes this kind of thinking and rethinking. The organization recently adopted the UNWTO Framework Convention on Tourism Ethics, for example., reflecting the fact that global tourism is now big business and its significant economic, social and cultural impacts must be fully considered.

Thinking and then acting — that’s what it’s about. Other speakers will share their experiences from around the world, giving us all a lot to think about!

The UNWTO has developed a wine tourism framework or prototype. Yolanda Perdomo, Director of the UNWTO Affiliate Members Program, will present the prototype and Gabriela Testa, President of Ente Mendoza Turismo, will discuss how it is being implemented in the Mendoza region.

Mendoza has enormous potential for wine tourism as I explained in my 2013 book Extreme Wine. I highlighted two very different wineries for their tourist experience: Tempus Alba and Salentein.

Situated close to Mendoza city, Tempus Alba hosts many young wine tourists who visit on bicycle. They enjoy the wines and food at the restaurant, of course, and receive an education about Malbec and the vineyard. The vibe is casual and fun, but the approach is seriously thoughtful. I’m a big fan of what Aldo Biondolillo and his family are doing at Tempus Alba.

Bodegas Salentein is located high in the Uco Valley and I don’t think many people bike there from Mendoza. It was the first destination winery in this now-booming wine region and features an art gallery, a stunning barrel room dubbed the “wine cathedral” and fine dining, too. As is the case of many Mendoza wineries, the architecture rivals and reinforces the dramatic Andes mountain scenery. Fantastic.

Theory and Practice

The UNWTO conference balances the theory and practice by including a number of local wine tourist experiences in the afternoon sessions. These winery visits will be a lot of fun, of course, but they will be most useful if participants give serious and critical consideration to what works (and why) and what could work better (and how can this be achieved). And then the trick is try to apply those sharpened critical skills to wine tourism offerings, strategies, and policies back home.

I will paste below the tentative list of wineries and experiences that will be available to the UNWTO conference participants and, by the way, to adventurous wine tourists generally when they visit Mendoza. The list gives a concrete sense of the diversity of wine tourism offerings available in this beautiful part of the world.

Bodega Trapiche Restaurant Espacio Trapiche, Chef Lucas Busto Historic winery and the arrival of the railway. Re-creation of two programs that are part of the Wine Tourism Events Calendar: “Wine and Cinema” and “Tango in the Vineyards”

Casa Vigil: Restaurant Casa Vigil, Chefs Santiago Maestre and Federico Petit Experience: Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy in the heart of Chachingo, The Inferno, The Purgatorio, and The Paradiso from Alejandro Vigil’s point of view

Washington State’s Chateau Ste Michelle is celebrating its birthday this year and there is a lot to celebrate, as I will explain below, even if the exact number of candles on the cake is open to debate.

Happy Birthday to The Chateau

The Chateau, as we call Chateau Ste Michelle in these parts, goes for 50 candles — and I think that’s fine. It was 50 years ago, in 1967, that the first varietal wines were released by a little-bitty operation called Ste Michelle Vineyards. The Chateau has released special edition wines that pay tribute to that first label.

The wines, sourced from Yakima vineyards according to the original label, were apparently very good. Howard Simon made them with help from California wine legend André Tchelistcheff, an early proponent of Washington’s wine potential.

Eighty-three candles are hard to blow out in one breath, but that’s the number you would need if you go all the way back to 1934. The end of Prohibition in the United States encouraged the National Wine Company (Nawico) and Pommerelle winery to start up in Washington State. They made mainly sweet wines, as was common in the United States on up into the 1960s.

The two companies merged in 1954 to form the American Wine Company, which eventually created the Ste Michelle Vineyards label for varietal wines as a supplement to the main sweet wine business.

Woodinville Wine Cluster

A Seattle financial executive named Wally Opdycke became very interested in the opportunities that dry wines presented in Washington State and eventually Opdycke and his partners purchased American Wine Company in 1972 and set out to take wine in a new path (even, according to Irvine, as they worked to sell off the sweet wine inventory that they had inherited from the previous owners).

Opdycke and company needed capital for the vineyards and winery facilities they envisioned and in due course two interested parties appeared. The first was Labatt’s Brewery from Toronto, who recognized the potential that the region’s wines presented. The second was a U.S. company — U.S. Tobacco of Connecticut.

The offers were much the same financially, according to Irvine, but Opdycke and partners opted for the UST deal (Altria subsequently acquired UST and is now The Chateau’s owner).

U.S. Tobacco provided the investment capital that was needed and in the process attracted talented viticulturalists and noteworthy winemakers who eventually left The Chateau to work on their own projects. Local farmers planted vineyards to help fill the tanks of The Chateau and then the many other wineries that followed. Thus was the Washington wine industry that we know today born and The Chateau played a leading role.

One of the biggest investments came online 41 years ago — the imposing winery in Woodinville, Washington just a short drive from Seattle. The winery, styled after a French chateau, sits on the beautiful grounds of the Stimson estate and draws so many visitors to the neighborhood that dozens of other wineries and tasting rooms have joined it in Woodinville, creating a dynamic wine cluster.

Where Are the Grapes?

This is a bit of a puzzle to some visitors because the only grape vines they see are mainly for atmosphere, not production. The gapes come from the east side of the Cascades several hours away. The Chateau’s strategy was to locate the show winery near to the market, not the vines (white wines are made in Woodinville, but red wines are made in Eastern Washington).

The separation works and you can see tanker trucks full of freshly pressed juice arrive at The Chateau during crush along with refrigerated trucks hauling bins of fresh-picked fruit to some of the dozens of other wineries in the neighborhood.

Whichever birthday you choose, The Chateau is worth celebrating. Under the leadership of Allen Shoup and now Ted Baseler it grew from modest origins to become by far the largest winery in Washington State and an important force in national and even international markets.

But Wait … There’s More

Chateau Michelle Wine Estates is the umbrella organization that brings together The Chateau and the wineries and partnerships that have grown from it. So here’s a final number to celebrate: 44 (and counting). That’s what you get when you add together 18 brands that Chateau Michelle Wine Estates currently operates in the Pacific Northwest, seven more in California, and 19 international partnerships (CMSE is the exclusive importer of Antinori wines, Torres wines from both Spain and Chile, Nicholas Feuillatte Champagne and Villa Maria among others).

The Chateau and the Antinori family are partners in two notable ventures: Col Solare on Red Mountain in Washington and Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley. And I cannot forget Eroica, the partnership between The Chateau and Ernest Loosen of the famous Mosel Valley wine family.

The Chateau as it has evolved has somehow managed to be both big and small. Taken together these wineries form the eight largest wine company in the U.S. according to Wine Business Monthly’s annual survey. Yet the individual producers retain a good deal of autonomy, part of the company’s “string of pearls” philosophy.

There is another dichotomy that The Chateau has somehow managed to navigate. Although it has corporate ownership and necessarily is influenced by that, it seems to behave in many ways more like a family winery. This accounts in part for its ability to partner with famous wine families like Antinori, Torres, and family-owned Villa Maria.

The Chateau deserves a lot of credit and respect for what it has done to build its own business, to build a Washington wine industry, and to promote American wine at home and abroad.

Happy Birthday to The Chateau and everyone who contributed to its remarkable rise!

Sue and I have wine tourism on our minds these days because we are getting ready for the United Nations World Tourism Organization’s global wine tourism conference in Mendoza, Argentina later this month.

We were in the Veneto at this time three years ago and wine tourism was on our minds there, too. Here is a Flashback Friday column from 2014 about wine tourism in Valpolicella.

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Valpolicella is well known for its great wines — Valpolicella Classico, Valpolicella Superiore, Ripasso della Valpolicella and of course Amarone. (It should also be known for its sweet wine, Recioto della Valpolicella, but that’s another story.)

But what about wine tourism? Sue and I were guests of the Valpolicella Consorzio earlier this month and one of our tasks was get a sense of Valpolicella as a wine tourist destination using a new wine tourism app (available as free download for Android and Apple mobile devices). Here is a brief report.

There’s an App for That!

Whenever I asked the winemakers we met if wine tourism was an important part of their business the answer was “yes!” but I think it is fair to say that for many of the actual tourists wine is at best a secondary reason for their visit.

The fact is that most tourists come to this part of Italy for non-wine reasons — for the history, culture and opera of Verona to the east, for example, or the resorts of Lake Garda to the west. Lying between these two attractive poles, Valpolicella is the perfect “day out” diversion (especially if it is a rainy day as has too often been the case in 2014) but not always the primary destination.

Come for Opera, Stay for Wine

Come for the beach or opera, stay for the wine! That could be Valpolicella’s wine tourism motto, but it would be selling the region short. What do dedicated wine tourists look for? Well, these days they want the complete experience — the wine and wineries, of course, plus beautiful scenery, great food, comfortable lodgings and that something extra to tell their friends back home about. Valpolicella would seem to tick each of these boxes.

The vineyard scenery is certainly spectacular — I really wasn’t prepared for the beautiful vistas. What a stunning setting! A great opportunity for fit cyclists with a nose for good wine or anyone willing to pull off the road and take in the panorama.

The wineries we visited using the Consorzio’s app showed the great variety of experiences available, which ranged from the super-modern architecture at Monteci to the classic and traditional at Valentina Cubi (one of our favorite stops). The sense of history was particularly strong at Santa Sofia, which is located in a villa designed by Andrea Palladio in the 16th century. You cannot dig much deeper into the soul of the Venteo than that!

Zymé, Celestino Gaspari’s ambitious winery in Pietro in Carlano deftly balanced the very old and the very new. The winery building features cutting edge architecture — see the photo taken looking out from the structure towards the nearby hillside vineyards. Wow!

The Zymé cellar and caves are carved into the hillside and touring them gives a sense of both history and nature. One of the best surprises was in the cavern than has become the working part of the winery. A spring that was discovered during construction was incorporated into the design and you can actually look down dozens of feet into the crevasse that the water has carved out over the years. A stunning sensory experience (and great for the humidity needed for barrel storage).

Beyond the Wine

Wine tourists need a place to stay and there seem to be many attractive options (this part of the Consorzio app is still under development). Although we stayed in a basic business hotel on this trip, we encountered a number of options, including very appealing apartments at Valentina Cubi.

If you want luxury, well there seem to be a number of five star experiences available. SalvaTerra’s beautiful estate includes vineyards, the winery, a small hotel and what must be a fine restaurant (judging from the number of chefs we saw working the kitchen as we passed by).

We have no doubt about the food at Villa Cordevigo since we were fortunate to have dinner at this estate that includes the Villabella winery, its vineyards, a fantastic hotel and spa and the sorts of amenities that make you want to linger forever. Or at least that’s how it seemed to us as we looked out over a garden to the pool and the vineyards jvust beyond with a full moon in the distance.

It’s the Food, Dummy

People talk about coming to Italy for the art and architecture, but let me tell you the truth. It’s the food! And we were fortunate to sample many typical dishes of the regional cuisine and they are worth the effort to seek out. Typical is an interesting word in this context — you see it everywhere in Italy and that’s a good thing. Here in the U.S. “typical” is sometimes a term of derision — Big Macs are “typical” fast food, for example. Ordinary. Unexceptional. Nothing to write home about. That’s typical for us.

In Italy, however, typical means “true to type” or authentic. And that’s why we Americans go gaga over Italian food — the authenticity just blows us away. And the authentic or typical dishes of Valpolicella, many prepared with the wines themselves, are enough to make any foodie go gaga. We enjoyed great meals at the Villa Cordevigo, Ristorante La Divina (overlooking Garda from high on a hill), Locanda 800 and the Enoteca Della Valpolicella.

We also appreciated the lunches that several wineries put together for us including a wonderful (typical!) meal of local meats and cheeses with polenta at Scriani, a satisfying buffet at Santa Sofia and a rather elaborate multi-course feast of typical dishes at the Cantina Valpolicella Negrar. All the food was wonderful — the meats and cheeses at Cesari and the completely addictive “crumb cake” we had with Recioto at Secondo Marco. Foodie paradise? You be the judge. And great wines, too.

That Something Extra

Valpolicella seems to have all the elements of a great wine tourism experience and I think the Consorzio’s app ties things together into a functional package. It will be even more useful when it has time to fill out with more wineries, restaurants and hotels.

Is the app alone enough to bring Valpolicella to center stage? Of course not. Some of the wineries obviously embrace wine tourism more completely than others, for example. It is important that three or four true “destination” wineries emerge that will make it easy for wine tourists to see that a two-day or longer visit can be fashioned that will sustain their interest and enthusiasm — with dozens of other wineries providing rich diversity (and reasons to return again and again) as happens in Napa, for example. And finally there must be even closer ties among the elements of the hospitality sector — wine, food, tourism and lodgings — which is not always easy to achieve.

It takes a village to build a wine route. But all the pieces are there and the app is a good way to bring them together.

But what about that “something extra” I mentioned earlier. What does Valpolicella offer that will push it over the top? Well, the towns and villages have the churches, squares, museums and villas that Italian wine tourists expect — it takes only a little effort to seek them out and I must confess that I actually enjoy the “small moments” more than the three-star attractions, so this suits me very well.

But maybe I am making this too hard. What’s that something special? Maybe it’s the chance to tack an evening in Verona or a day on Lake Garda on to your Valpolicella wine tour experience? Perhaps its time for the wine tail to wag the Veneto tourist dog and not the other way around! (Gosh, I wonder how that will sound in Italian?) Food for thought!

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Here’s a musical tribute to the merry band of wine bloggers on our Valpolicella tour.

Mauro Fermariello has created a beautiful video of our Valpolicella wine blogger tour, which can be found in his website, www.winestories.it .

Charles Smith’s Jet City Winery is located across the street from historic Boeing Field in Seattle’s gritty but hip Georgetown neighborhood.

The building started life as a Dr. Pepper bottling plant. The public spaces reflect both the structure’s mid-century roots and Charles Smith’s signature aesthetic, with lots of glass, metal, and recycled wood. The cellar is sleek, efficient, and spotlessly clean.

Sue and I met up with veteran Wine Economist research assistants Bonnie and Richard a few weeks ago at Sisters and Brothers, a hip little restaurant that makes delicious Nashville hot chicken, fried green tomatoes, and other memorable southern fare just steps from the winery. The food was great, but that wasn’t why we were there. Our mission, following up on last week’s column, was to learn what Charles Smith and his team are up to now and where they are headed in the future.

Technical Innovations

I became curious about Jet City Winery a year ago when I read an article about it in Wines & Vines that focused on the technical aspects of the winery. The author, Andrew Adams, interviewed Brennon Leighton, director of winemaking, and reported on many of the innovations and special features of the Jet City facility.

One innovation that especially caught my attention was a set of design features that minimized some of the “heavy lifting” aspects of cellar jobs so that women would not be disadvantaged relative to men. “It’s a pretty male-dominated world on the cellar floor,” Leighton told Adams, “and a lot of that has to do with lots of fairly vigorous, high-labor jobs. I really wanted to cut that labor down so anyone could do any job at any time.”
Our team found that this is just one example of the extreme attention to detail that is everywhere at Jet City.

Brennon Leighton is one of Washington’s most respected winemakers. He was in charge of making the white wines (including some spectacular Eroica bottlings) at Chateau St. Michelle before moving to rising star boutique Efeste. Charles Smith lured Leighton away, first as consultant and then as director of winemaking and viticulture, responsible for a dynamic array of wines. It was a successful move judging by the results.

It is a good thing that Leighton has a lot of energy, because his workload is pretty fierce. Although Constellation Brands has purchased the Charles Smith Wines portfolio that includes Kung Fu Girl Riesling and Boom Boom Syrah, for example, Smith, Leighton and the team are still hands-on involved and will help Constellation scale up production while maintaining quality.

A Winery with a Lot of Wines

There is a lot going on here (and lots of wines to taste at Jet City). The current Charles Smith lineup ranges from the Vino line of “modernist” wines made with Washington-grown Italian grape varieties on up to the iconic and collectible K Vinters single-vineyard wines.

It seems like Charles Smith is always up to something new and with the sleek Jet City Winery facility the pace of innovation seems to have accelerated. We found ourselves especially intrigued by three relatively new wine labels: Sixto, B.Leighton, and Wines of Substance.

The Sixto wines are in part a response to the criticism that Washington has not produced very many great Chardonnays. Sixto Chardonnays highlight great fruit from a handful of carefully managed sites along with precision winemaking to produce surprising and distinctive wines.

B.Leighton is Brennon Leighton’s distinctive personal wine line. Bonnie and Richard were charmed by Gratitude, which is inspired by the wines of Bandol, and a Petit Verdot that we tasted from barrel (Richard left with a magnum).

The Wines of Substanace caught me a bit off guard. Charles Smith has sold wines brands before (House Wine to Precept, Kung Fu Girl and the others to Constellation), but this is the only brand he has ever purchased. Leighton explained how it is developing into something special. He casually suggested that we try to Sauvignon Blanc from the Sunsent Vineyard in Ancient Lakes and … wow! … what a great wine. More France than Washington. Unique.

A Lot of Wine in the Wines

Then he poured the Cabernet Sauvignon, which sells for $17 at the winery (I saw it for less at Costco) but tastes like a lot more. He talked about the special efforts that are made in the vineyard and the careful cellar work, too. A lot of time and trouble for a $17 bottle of wine but, Leighton explained, a lot of people can’t afford to spend $50 or $100 on a bottle of wine. They ought to be able to get a really good bottle of wine at a relatively affordable price.

Not everyone can afford to pay $17, of course, but if they can then this is the real deal. Or as Leighton commented, “There’s a lot of wine in our wines.”

Winemakers (like artists and authors) often have big egos, and while Brennan Leighton has strong ideas, there is an appealing humility to the way he operates. His idea of wine is to work diligently in the vineyard and then let the wines express themselves in the cellar. His success with both large production projects like Kung Fu Girl and small lot wines like Sixto and B.Leighton speaks for itself.

So what’s ahead for Charles Smith’s wine universe? We’ve got new projects in the works, Leighton told us. But I can’t tell you what they are. So I was only a little surprised when, a couple of weeks after our visit, Charles Smith announced a major re-branding.“Wines of Substance” is now the name of the umbrella company that includes K Vinters, Sixto, Vino Casasmith, Substance, B.Leighton, and Charles & Charles.

Is this the new direction that you couldn’t tell us about, I asked Brennon, or just part of it? “Part of it,” he said, without offering any hints. Hmmm. It will be interesting to see what is revealed when the next Charles Smith shoe drops!

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Thanks to Brennon and everyone at Jet City Winery for your help and hospitality. Special thanks to Bonnie and Richard for their incisive questions and analysis.

Here’s a video where Charles Smith talks about his Jet City Winery project.

What do you know about Charles Smith? He’s a marketing genius! Where does he get his ideas? Do you know what he is going to do next?

We were in a restaurant in Yountville, the heart of the Napa Valley, talking with one of the valley’s best winemakers. There was a lot to discuss, but our friend was pretty focused. He was fascinated by Charles Smith.

Smith came to Walla Walla to make terroir-driven wines. His first vintage was 330 cases of the 1999 K Syrah made from grapes grown in The Rocks vineyard area supplied by Cayuse winemaker Christophe Baron. The wine was so good, according to an excellent Wine Spectator profile, that it convinced local bankers to help finance the operation. Bankable wine? Quite an accomplishment.

House Wine to Kung Fu Girl

K Syrah is a clever, memorable wine brand (think “Que Sera Sera”), but the commercial branding story really starts in 2003-2004, when a killing frost hit Walla Walla and winemakers like Smith had to scramble to get grapes or bulk wine from other parts of Washington to give them something to sell to pay the bills.

Smith seized the moment to launch the Magnificent Wine Company and its House Wine lineup. The popularly-priced negociant wines with the fun labels sold out. Everyone needs a house wine — House Red, House White, and so on. Sales quickly scaled.

Precept Brands invested in House Wine in 2006 and purchased the brand outright in 2011. The current lineup includes House Red, House White, Steak House, Fish House, and other House wines packaged in bottles, boxes, and cans.

Charles Smith Wines came next — continuing the House Wine philosophy of giving people what they want in a simple but stylish way, but a step or two up the wine market ladder. Boom Boom Syrah, Velvet Devil Merlot, Eve Chardonnay, Chateau Smith Cabernet Sauvignon and who can forget Kung Fu Girl Riesling — each wine had its own personality and offered buyers lots of quality per dollar.

These CSW wines have two things in common. First, they have distinctive graphic design elements provided by the talented Rikke Korff, who has handled all the design work for Charles Smith since the beginning. The labels are instantly recognizable and always make me smile. Nothing like the staid chateau drawings or cute critter images that many wines feature.

The second common feature is that the wines are good and good value. Kung Fu Girl Riesling, the best-selling wine in the line and a frequent recipient of “Top 100” wine awards, sources grapes from the exceptional Evergreen Vineyard. It’s the real deal.

The Modernist Wine Project

There are a lot of ways to think about the CSW wine program, but the winery website likes to call it part of a “modernist” project. The idea seems to be to look at consumers as they really are and then give them a product that satisfies their needs. This means wines that are ready to drink upon release, that are balanced and taste good with food or without it, and that are affordable and carried to market on a relatively simple message relayed through exciting graphical design.

The genius of Charles Smith was to put all of this together — the wines, the message, the design, the marketing — and to get the project rolling in 2006, just before the Great Recession hit the United States. The CSW wines offered recession-shocked buyers an opportunity to trade over to a more casual idea of wine, not just to trade down to something a bit cheaper. Mix all this with a lot of hard work in the vineyard, cellar and on marketing and it is no wonder the wines were so successful.

It is well known that I admire this sort of genius. The subtitle of my 2011 book Wine Wars referenced the “Miracle of Two Buck Chuck.” It was indeed a miracle that Fred Franzia and his team at Bronco Wine and the smart folks at Trader Joe’s markets could give millions of Americans the confidence they previously lacked to try and enjoy wine. Charles Smith built upon this foundation with great success and in a particular “modernist” way, first with House Wine and then the CSW brands.

The modernist project continues. Smith will consult with Constellation Brands on the CSW portfolio to help it scale up successfully. And then there is Vino, which was not part of the Constellation Brands deal, a tasty lineup of Washington-grown Italian-varietal wines that are instantly recognizable as a Charles Smith product by their label design and offer an unexpectedly sincere homage to the Italian origins of their grapes.

The Pinot Grigio, for example, has minerality you won’t find in a lot of other wines of this type and the Moscato will remind you a bit of a nice Moscato d’Asti. These wines probably don’t have to be this good to sell at their price points. But they are.

The Battle of Land Versus Brand

It would be easy to typecast Charles Smith as a brand guy in the battle of Land versus Brand. The fact of the Constellation Brands purchase offers some evidence. After all, Constellation is famous these days for paying big bucks for brands that have no vineyards or wineries attached to them. The Meomi brand was purchased for $315 million and The Prisoner for $285 million, for example.

Viewed in this perspective, Charles Smith’s experience with House Wine and then the CSW brands seems to typecast him as a very successful brand-spinner — a genius at the game as my Napa Valley winemaker friend pointed out. And what you would expect from Smith is more of the same.

But there is more to Charles Smith than brand-building. The K Vintners wine that started it all back in Walla Walla has evolved into a rather interesting collectiomn of single-vineyard wines (Land not just cool Brand), exploring the possibilities of Syrah and Viognier with side-trips to Sangiovese, Tempranillo and Malbec. An all-Chardonnay line called Sixto offers single-vineyard wines plus a multi-vineyard blend.

Washington’s Randall Grahm?

And so the question must be asked, is Charles Smith Land or Brand? The answer seems to be both, which makes him a complicated person (and maybe more of a genius than my Napa friend realized). Is Charles Smith Washington wine’s answer to California’s Randall Grahm? I dunno. What do you think?

To find out what Charles Smith is up to these days and maybe learn about what comes next we paid a visit a few weeks ago to his Jet City Winery near Boeing Field in Seattle to learn about a particular vision of Land and Brand. Come back next week to see what we discovered.